As one of 10 demonstrators arrested March 13 at the Federal Building, I would like to clarify the intentions behind our group's decision to invite arrest. The actions that led to our arrest were intentional, non-violent civil disobedience.

We crossed the police line to make a point. We demonstrated responsible civil disobedience: endangering no one, disrupting civic life minimally and respecting the institutions and the police officers who arrested us.

We spoke for thousands in highlighting our desperate resolve to prevent a unilateral invasion by the United States of Iraq without a declaration of war, as required by our Constitution and in contravention of the United Nations Charter that our country in a more enlightened age helped draft and ratify.

Civil disobedience is a long and honored part of this nation's history. Our nation, with its visionary commitment to liberty, equality and justice, might never have come to be without the courage of a few individuals who followed their consciences in disobedience of a misguided, autocratic government. Their small acts of bravery became an unstoppable flood.

The abolition of slavery, women's right to vote and the Civil Rights Act are examples of social change wrought by small groups of committed individuals who included civil disobedience in their peaceful arsenal to publicize injustice and sway an opposing majority to their cause.

Looking back at history, one can imagine such events happened neatly. The myth persists, for example, of Rosa Parks sitting down at the front of a bus one day and changing history. Reality is much more messy. Now, as surely in past movements, disagreements abound within the peace coalitions about what is appropriate and effective.

Our group had been in discussion for weeks. It was messy, hard, nerve-stretching work. In the end, our action was a kind of drama: We broke from the main body of demonstrators on the sidewalk and crossed the plaza toward the row of federal agents guarding the entrance to the Federal Building. When we were told to stop, we did so and set down three black coffins where the public could see them. We turned our backs on the officers and displayed U.N. and U.S. flags, then turned and crossed the police line into the arms of the agents. We made clear our peaceful intent and willingness to cooperate fully in our arrest. We were treated very kindly.

We have failed to prevent the war but our failure is small compared with that of the war itself.

War is a failure -- of imagination, diplomacy and vision. In the 21st century, with all the tools, experience and knowledge at our disposal, it is unacceptable. Our troubled world risks plunging into a new era of violence, terror, repression and despair at the very moment of the greatest opportunity in history to craft a global community based on understanding, justice, cooperation and non-violent resolution of conflict.

War is a loss we simply cannot afford. Our country faces far greater dangers and challenges from its domestic failures than it does from any external enemy.

Non-violent acts of disobedience may empower and embolden other citizens and elected officials to cross lines in their own experience, to step beyond their comfort zones and make visible and unequivocal their rejection of a world order based on violence and coercion.

Money buys our democracy. The world order the Bush administration envisions is one where corporatism is happily wedded to militarism. The real business of running the world is being carried out behind the closed doors of government and corporate meetings. I consider it my civic duty to resist -- in ways symbolic and direct -- the loss of the country I was brought up to respect and cherish.

Henry David Thoreau, at the end of his essay "Civil Disobedience," wrote: "There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly."

With imagination, cooperation, unity and adherence to the best in ourselves, our nation and our friends around the world, we can begin this millennium with a new commitment to the power of non-violence, cooperation and global community. The alternative is truly too horrible to contemplate.

Will Rose lives in Seattle

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